9/11 families call for congressional hearing on treatment of remains

Rosemary Cain held a picture of her firefighter son, George, who was killed at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, as she stood outside the 9/11 Museum Visitors Center on Sunday afternoon, protesting plans for unidentified victims’ remains to be housed at the museum.

“The families have the right to say what is going to be done to their sacred, precious remains,” said Cain, of Massapequa, N.Y. “This is my son who I gave life to, who I raised.”

Cain and other members of the 9/11 Parents & Families of Firefighters and WTC Victims held a press conference to announce the results of an email survey of victim’s families that they conducted and call for congressional hearings to develop a policy for how to properly handle remains. The group has been calling for the remains to be separated from what they refer to as a commercial venture, since learning of the design in 2009 — but this is the first attempt to reach out to victims’ families.

Of the roughly, 2,100 people emailed, 350 family members responded and 332 said they opposed the museum repository.

Ringwood resident Christel DeSimone, who did not receive the survey, said she would prefer an above-ground memorial separate from the museum.

Her son Chris, a forensic accountant for Marsch & McLennan, is among the more than 180 victims from North Jersey killed in the terrorist attacks. His remains were never found.

DeSimone said she also thinks the museum is too extravagant and will become too expensive to operate.

“They’re not asking the families,” she said. “I kind of get disillusioned by all of this.”

Norman Siegel, an attorney representing 17 families who sued the city to get a list of family members of the 2,749 victims at the World Trade Center so they could notify them of the plans and seek their input, said the email survey was the first time relatives have been asked about the placement of unidentified remains.

“These family members believe the remains should be returned to the World Trade Center site, but in a location that is separate and distinct from the museum and above ground, akin to the Tomb of the Unknowns,” Siegel said.

Siegel’s group lost the lawsuit – and has filed notice of an appeal – but was able to send the survey with the help of Bill Doyle, a former Staten Island resident living in Florida, who began maintaining a database of victims’ relatives after he lost his son Joey at the World Trade Center.

The private foundation that runs the memorial – which opened last fall – and the museum, plans to house the unidentified and unclaimed remains in the Office of Chief Medical Examiner’s Repository at bedrock level of the museum. The remains would be behind a wall and inaccessible to the public. The wall, which would be inscribed with a quote from Virgil, “No day shall erase you from the memory of time,” would be viewable to museum visitors.

In a statement, the president of the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum, Joe Daniels, said the victims’ families have known about that plan.

“Since the very beginning, victims’ family members have strongly advocated for the unidentified remains to be returned to the World Trade Center site,” Daniels said. “This is the plan that has been honored and is being implemented.”

The Lower Manhattan Development Corp., which was created to oversee the construction at Ground Zero, established a Family Advisory Council and held public forums on the plans, but family members protesting Sunday said they were not consulted.

Rosaleen Tallon, from Yonkers, who lost her firefighter brother Sean in the attacks, said the museum is using the Virgil quote on key chains and jewelry that is being sold in the Visitor’s Center, something she compared to taking the inscription off her brother’s tombstone.

“How would you like for your loved ones in a cemetery for the [epitaph] to be made into key chains, bracelets, necklaces,” she said. “Are our loved ones' remains marketable?”

She added, “That’s why they do not belong in the hands of a museum. They belong in the hands and the decision making of their families who lost them 10 years ago.”

The group also voiced its support for 9/11 families and military families who recently learned partial remains of the victims of the attack on the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pa., crash site were disposed of in a landfill at Dover Air Force Base.

An independent panel that studied management issues at Dover Air Force Base’s mortuary briefly mentioned the landfill disposal in a report it released during a press conference last week.

“It has all just been made worse because now we know that the plane that hit the Pentagon, that those remains were put in the garbage dump, so there is just pain all around this subject,” said Herb Ouida, a River Edge resident who lost his son Todd in the World Trade Center attacks.

Ouida, whose son worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, praised the efforts of the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office, which contacted him four different times to tell him portions of his son’s remains had been found.

“The medical examiner has been fantastic,” Ouida said. “I’ve been to their office. They have been so sensitive to the needs of the families and using the latest technology to say, ‘OK, if we can’t identify it today, maybe in a few years we can.’ That’s been their attitude.”

Ouida said he supports the families of the victims, particularly those who never received remains, but also understands why the medical examiner would want to have access to the remains to continue trying to indentify them.

“The truth is that no matter what happens, there will still be that pain,” he said. “It’s an impossible situation.”